The corpses had been cooked of all their moisture. Already blackened from what looked like fire, the sun had done the rest of the job. The bodies that the vultures and coyotes left weree mummies. One laid on its back, one hand curled up over its face as though it were shielding its eyes from the light. Aidan leaned over and took the scorched camouflage hat off the dead soldier’s head and rested it over his grimacing, crumbling face.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Gerard was scared of Aidan. When Gerard got scared, he got angry. Aidan had lost two teeth that way on the hike in. “Just take his gun and leave him alone.”
“Nobody likes being stared at. The sun’s had one miserable eye on us lately. I’m letting him sleep more peacefully.” He bent over and looked down at the body. One of its legs had been carried off. The patch on his vest said Hamilton. Aidan grabbed the rifle at the dead man’s side and checked the ammunition.
“Besides, who knows when it’ll be handy to have a dead man owing me a favor.” Considering that the dead far outnumbered the living and these days Aidan’s chances of being dead by tomorrow got better and better all the time, he figured it would come in real handy.
The water had gone foul in town. Vultures circled in the sky from sun up to sun down. There was even word that the inscrutable Bigfoot tribe had relocated. The creatures were strange and harmless, but they seemed to have a way of knowing when things were going bad. Then one day strange lights and terrible sounds were heard from the Ranch. No word came in from the soldiers over the radio. It had been a month since they’d visited the town.
The Rachel town council sent the three young men to investigate. Aidan. Gerard. Wynne. When Gerard’s lot was drawn to go, his family wept. His daughter wailed and wailed until the mother carried her out of the hall. When Wynne volunteered, the women of the town twittered anxiously and the men looked solemn. When Aidan volunteered, there was silence. He wondered if it had made them uncomfortable or if he just simply wouldn’t be missed. The town figured they were being sent to die. With everything horrible that walked the earth since the Nightmare, whatever had brought the quiet to the Ranch could likely swallow them in an instant.
But if Wynne was going, he had to go. He might not get another chance to be alone with him.
Aidan found a corpse that had a pair of boots that looked to be his size. He pulled them off while Wynne and Gerard looked at a tank in the middle of the yard. The cannon barrel drooped and the treads had fused together. Gerard climbed on top of it and began pulling on the hatch. It wouldn’t budge. Aidan inspected the boots, pouring out chunks of flesh that had come off along with the boot. He sighed and dropped it.
“This thing won’t open,” Gerard said. “And you know what we’d find inside if it did? Maggots and more dead men. We’ve seen everything we need to see. This place is dead. There’s nobody left alive to tell us what happened here. We might as well head back to Rachel.”
“We can’t,” Wynne said. “There might be people alive inside the buildings that we could help. And there might be answers inside with them. We can’t go back yet. We have nothing to tell the town, and we don’t know if Rachel is still in danger. We don’t know if what came here is still around.”
“Exactly,” Gerard said. “Just the reason to get the fuck out of here. We have some idea what happened. If we die, then nobody will know anything at all.”
Aidan leaned on his rifle, watching them. They remembered he was there and Wynne turned to him. “Aidan, what do you think?”
“Who gives a fuck what he thinks? He’ll probably just say something that doesn’t make any sense anyway.”
“Oh, we should stay,” Aidan said, staring at Wynne. “I’m not done here.” Wynne’s face clouded. Gerard didn’t notice.
“Fine. We’ll stay and see how many corpses we can find. Maybe we can get them all to owe us favors. Right, psychopath?”
“At the very least, we’ll give them some company for a little while,” Aidan said. Wynne looked nervous. Gerard turned his back on them and gestured at the largest building.
“We’ll check that one. If there’s nothing in it, then we’re done here. We can go back to Rachel and tell them what we’ve found.” Gerard would get to return to his family. Wynne would be treated like a hero. Gerard wanted return to those who loved him. Wynne wanted to be loved even more. Aidan understood. He knew how powerful a motivator love was. Especially when it could be so precious and rare.
